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MEMBER DIARY

Election Integrity – An Obama Strategy?

Today, I learn that in Michigan there are over 4,000 non US citizens registered to vote in that state. The Secretary of State there, Ruth Johnson, sees this as evidence which makes voter identification in Michigan critical in order to protect the integrity of this and future elections. Naturally, the very question of voter ID makes United States Attorney Eric Holder’s eyes bulge. Some say, and I include myself in this assertion that Holder and the Obama administration need to pad the vote in all states, but most particularly in important swing states like Michigan which, at present, leans toward the incumbent.

When you consider the number of states which automatically register voters in conjunction with obtaining a driver’s license, the problem of the illegal vote comes into clearer focus. Not only can the “motor voters” who are auto-registered be non-citizens, they may also be felons who have lost their franchise due to their anti-social behavior. In Secretary Johnson’s examination of the voter rolls, she learned that many of the unqualified voters her staff found among the voter rolls have a history of voting.

Johnson intends to require voters to affirm their US citizenship at the polls when they appear to cast a ballot, a move which has voting rights advocates, labor unions, and the State Democratic Party up in arms. Several groups filed a lawsuit against Johnson and her office over the citizenship affirmation and, according to Johnson the reluctance to purge unqualified voters from the rolls goes all the way to Washington, D.C. Johnson says she has made four separate attempts to gain assistance in her efforts to remove non-citizens from the rolls from the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. These federal agencies turned Johnson away.

Earlier this year the state of Florida was forced to file suit against the Federal Government in order to obtain the same citizenship data from the Department of Homeland Security for the purpose of purging the voter rolls. It took five months and a game of musical lawsuits before the Feds finally gave Florida the information necessary to clean up the voter rolls. It’s not easy to make sure illegal others are not interfering with American elections.

In a world where terrorist elements are infiltrating our every institution, it seems prudent to make very sure that only qualified voters are involved in this very important election. The reluctance of the Obama administration to be a part of a systematic verification of voter qualifications speaks volumes